Nazis Orchestrating Attacks, Some Say

HAMBURG, Germany -- Christian Worch`s metallic-charcoal Mercedes Benz, a kind of command post on wheels, has shown up at some of the worst attacks on foreigners in Germany in the past six months.

The car was in Rostock on Aug. 22 when hundreds of Germans stoned and firebombed a hostel for foreigners while thousands of residents applauded.

A week later the car, its cellular telephone and CB radios humming, was in Cottbus when a mob of neo-Nazis and skinheads attacked another foreigners` hostel.

``My car was detected, but there is no proof I was,`` Worch said. Investigators agree he has ``an alibi.``

Worch, 36, claims the mantle of neo-Nazi leadership in Germany. In his words, ``My main job is to develop a national network to coordinate the activities of the right.``

Investigators say Worch`s network is behind a campaign of vicious rhetoric intended to drive non-Germans out of the country and to bring Nazi-style politics back into the open.

They think, but cannot prove, it is also behind the recent startling increase in attacks on refugees and German Jews, attacks that have left 19 dead, hundreds injured and thousands terrified.

``There is a conspiracy, there is no doubt,`` said Ignatz Bubis, a Frankfurt businessman, Holocaust survivor and president of the German Jewish Council. ``The (intelligence chiefs) know it; the youngsters (who carry out the attacks) are just being used (by the neo-Nazis).``

The U.S. Army`s top intelligence officer for terrorism in Western Europe, Heidelberg-based Lt. Col. Rand Lewis, agrees.

``There is no question that what is happening in Germany is the product of an organizational neo-Nazi network,`` said Lewis, author of the 1991 book A Nazi Legacy.

That network, coordinated out of the tiny village of Delfzyl, across the Netherlands border, is known as the `Gesinnunggemeinschaft Der Neuen Front` (GDNF). The name means ``Comrades of the Same Ideals Working Together for a New Front.``

Its goals:

-- Rebuild the National Socialist German Workers` Party, the old Nazi Party.

-- Throw non-Germans out of the country.

-- Reclaim political power.

``The GDNF is an organization of those working together with one goal, the same ideas, but it is not a structure that we can identify (legally),`` said Dr. Hans-Gert Lange, spokesman for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German version of the FBI.

Its roots, Lange said, are in the Action Front for National Socialism, which was at the top of the neo-Nazi pyramid until its leader, Michael Kuhnen, died of AIDS in 1991.

Kuhnen developed a cadre of ``storm troopers`` who moved from city to city to organize rallies and fights. Worch was one of his top lieutenants.

``I joined Kuhnen`s storm troopers in 1977 because I believed we had to fight to attain our goals. I still believe it,`` Worch said.

Worch presently is leader of the National Liste, or National Group, a Hamburg-based legal political party with about 500 dues-paying members. Ten years ago he spent a year in jail for publishing anti-Semitic propaganda. Two years ago he ran for city council and got 0.1 percent of the vote.

These days he is a full-time political organizer; he says he has money ``from an inheritance.``

Worch`s National Liste may seem too small to stir up much trouble, but it is not alone.

``There are more than 6,800 of the violent extremists involved in more than 70 groups,`` Lange said. ``They are a loose mass of friends who know each other. It is the worst-case scenario in terms of intelligence.

``The best-case scenario is when you have a large, well-organized organization and you have a human source close to the top. The worst-case scenario is when you have a large number of small groups that are badly interrelated, so you have no reliable human source that can give you an entire picture,`` he said. ``GDNF is not a group or even a registered party.``

The disarray, say experts and the extremists themselves, is only partly due to the competing zeal of young political operatives.

``There is a certain amount of German efficiency in this disorganization,`` said Berntd Siegler, who has written about the neo-Nazis for the Berlin daily Die Tagerzeitung for years. ``By design GDNF is not a party, not a street organization or a strong group ... so police don`t find it attractive to fight them.``

Said Worch: ``We are not well organized, we are splintered in different groups, at least 70, so there is no one great group that the police can watch.``

Dirk Lehmann, a journalist who has followed the neo-Nazi movement for the magazine Stern for two years, thinks there is a coordination between the various neo-Nazi groups.

``They coordinate, they talk to each other, they have a fraternity-like relationship,`` Lehmann said. ``But the police have a tough time following them because post-war German law is designed to prevent another Gestapo-like police state.``